A Mumbai of Wants

How Gandhian self-sufficiency clashes with urban desires in this fast-paced metropolis.

By

Chandrahas Choudhury

October 7, 2011

"Frankly, sir: I don't understand what it is you want." Midway through Aravind Adiga's "Last Man in Tower," a grizzled lawyer, Parekh, spits out these words to his client and the novel's protagonist, the retired schoolteacher Yogesh Murthy. By the standards of Mumbai, where the novel is set, Murthy is a strange man and these words capture, in a nutshell, the fog of incomprehension that rises around almost all his encounters and transactions in the city.

For months, Murthy—known affectionately as "Masterji," or schoolteacher—has been acting differently from those around him. The residents of his old cooperative housing society in a Mumbai suburb have been offered fat sums of money by a powerful builder to leave, so that he may knock down the building and construct luxury apartments in its place. Masterji is the only resident holding out, simply because he sees no reason to exchange the old for the new, and hates being browbeaten or manipulated. Parekh, who represents the city's instinct for continuous movement and pecuniary gain, is run aground by Masterji's constant refrain: "I keep telling you: nothing."

That "nothing" already places Masterji at the other end of the human scale from Balram Halwai, the cunning and callous protagonist of "The White Tiger," Mr. Adiga's first novel in 2008 that won the Man Booker Prize. While Balram, symbolic of India's aspirational nouveau riche, launches himself at his world with his desires, battering down every closed door with money, violence or guile, Masterji instead has a Gandhian self-sufficiency about him, with which he repels the many Balram-type characters in "Last Man in Tower" who seek to dislodge him so that they may advance.

This reversal in the protagonist's principles makes Mr. Adiga's second novel much more morally intriguing than his first one. Balram's world of wants was somehow too facile and outlandish. In "The White Tiger," he makes his way from a tea shop in the backwaters of Bihar to the sparkle of New Delhi; murders his employer as the only way to move further up the economic ladder; steals a loot, bribes the police and then starts his own company.

Balram was meant to shock the reader with his cool amorality, but there was something suspiciously smooth and managed about his glib and giddy ascent. And both character and narrator were united in their cynicism. Mr. Adiga intended Balram's rags-to-riches story to be an allegory for the dark underbelly of India's economic rise. But that, at times, ended up seeming disingenuous; there are many who get ahead in India today without murder and robbery. "The White Tiger" drew simplistic binary worlds, "an India of Light" and "an India of Darkness."

ENLARGE

Last Man in Tower

By Aravind Adiga Knopf, 400 pages, $26.95

In contrast, "Last Man in Tower" is more realistic and compelling. As urban development clashes with older values, Masterji's passionately articulated ethics shows itself as more paradoxical and disturbing than the spectacle of Balram's wanton greed.

The book's vast canvas—it's twice the length of the previous novel—allows for more persuasive novelistic patterning, too. Mr. Adiga's eye for Mumbai and all its quirks and privations allows him to flood the book with acute depictions of the city's pulsing but bedraggled landscape, as well as memorable riffs on the weight and meaning of its past.

Mumbai was born and exists today as a commercial city. When Masterji declares that he wants nothing but the plain life, routine, and surroundings that he already possesses, his words ring against an earlier passage in the novel about what Mumbai requires from its denizens. "Only a man must want something; for everyone who lives here knows that the islands will shake, and the mortar of the city will dissolve, and Bombay will turn again into seven small stones glistening in the Arabian sea, if he ever forgets to ask the question: What do you want?"

Mr. Adiga draws out Masterji's neighbors—a real-estate broker, a social worker, a cybercafe owner, an aged couple—who have their unique lens on the city, but who all unite under a canopy of wanting. They all want Masterji to acquiesce to the new construction so they can make a tidy profit or salt something away for their children. They turn against him, abusing him verbally and cutting off his water supply. Wandering through the metropolis in search of forces—including the police, the media, the law and his own son—to defend him, Masterji gradually arrives at the unsettling realization that he is all alone.

Meanwhile, the air of the housing society grows more feverish until it turns violent. In one of the book's most gruesome scenes, Masterji's front door is smeared with feces by a neighbor. But the next morning the old man is on his knees, "scraping the grooves and ridges into which [the] excrement was hardening."

The narrative mode that Mr. Adiga practices might be called the Indian Grotesque. Images of disease, disfigurement and death ripple through the book, applied both to people and to landscape, and hammered home with a compulsive intensity.

Page for page, there are more animals, birds, insects and reptiles in Mr. Adiga's work than in that of any other contemporary Indian novelist. One of the author's purposes is to show the cunning and unthinking violence of beasts in the novel's degraded human beings—a world of naked instincts.

In one scene: "Masterji kept walking in a straight line, like an animal dragged by its collar." In another: "A man in rags was hopping from tetrapod to tetrapod, like an egret on a hippo's teeth." The builder moves to assault his mistress "as if he were closing the trap on an animal." Even Masterji's gruff poise is transformed, in the imagination of one of his neighbors, to animal wile: "You have seen how a cow turns its eyes to the side when it shits, and pretends not to know what it's doing?"

Of course, the trick is to not overdo such metaphors and Mr. Adiga fails on this count. He is frequently a prisoner of his own compulsions, metaphorizing wildly and vaguely. For instance, "Cigarette smoke rose up her face like sideburns." Or: "A small red moth flitted about Masterji's hand, like a particle of air trying to warn him about something." But despite these faults, there is a strange and harsh humanity about "Last Man in Tower" that makes it a novelistic vision of genuine interpretative power.

—Mr. Choudhury is the author of the Mumbai-based novel "Arzee the Dwarf" (HarperCollins, 2009).

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